Government Trust in China: Determinants, Trends and Methodology

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Political trust is a desirable commodity that all political systems wish to acquire. The Chinese government is considered to enjoy remarkably high levels of public support and trust. This is puzzling for three reasons. First, it is an authoritarian government; the public has neither full information about, nor genuine participation in the selection of government leaders. Second, this government is well-known for regularly using repression, censorship, and coercion to maintain political and social order. Third, empirical evidence demonstrates that the high levels of political trust in China cannot be completely attributed to political fear. China is also featured by “hierarchical trust,” whereby political trust decreases as one looks down the administrative hierarchy –– a situation opposed to many Western democracies. Why do individuals have remarkably high levels of trust in the government in China? How sustainable can this trust be over time? What explains the variation in political trust across levels of government? More fundamentally, to what extent is the data that revealed high political trust in China reliable? Methodologically, how do we test preference falsification in empirical studies? This panel will discuss and address these questions.

This panel is comprised of four papers that examine political trust in China from various perspectives. Dan Chen and Wenbin Li’s paper uses the recent democratic protests in Hong Kong to examine Hong Kongers’ trust in the central government and uncovers a trend of trust polarization. They find that lacking support for the institution of “one country two systems,” rather than a localist identity, fuels the trust polarization. Meina Cai and Qi Zhang’s paper uses land expropriation in rural China to gauge the relationship between policy implementation and political trust in the local government. They identify a spillover effect of policy implementation on political trust: in the villages where land-taking compensation is inadequate, not only land-dispossessed villagers expressed a declined trust in their local authorities, the decline in trust also applies to those whose land was not expropriated. Xian Huang’s paper uses the household registration system, or hukou –– an institution that divides citizens into urban versus rural and local versus non-local categories –– as an angle to examine trust in both the central and local governments. Specifically, the rural-to-urban hukou change is found to increase the hukou changers’ trust in the central government, while the nonlocal-to-local hukou change is found to increase their trust in the local governments.

The first three papers shed light on the determinants of political trust in China. Their findings are all drawn from survey data, with the implicit assumption that the data on government trust is reliable and accurately reveals the respondents’ genuine opinion of the government. Yingnan Zhou and Xuchuan Lei’s paper provides a novel method that can capture preference falsification at both individual and aggregate levels in empirical studies and can draw generalizable inference.

Put together, the four papers provide answers to the central questions of this panel: why Chinese citizens have remarkably high levels of trust in the government; how the trust in government evolves over time, spreads across areas, and differentiates among different levels of the government in China. The diversity in issues, methods, and findings in these papers should provoke more studies on political trust. This panel also speaks to the broad literature on public opinion, political legitimacy and stability of authoritarian regimes.

Sub Unit

• Division 13: Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries

Individual Presentations

• Trust Polarization in Hong Kong: Institution and Identity - Dan Chen, University of Richmond; Wenbin Li

• Land Expropriation and Political Trust: A Spillover Effect - Qi Zhang, Fudan University; Meina Cai, University of Connecticut

• The Chinese Dream: Hukou, Social Mobility and Trust in Government - Xian Huang, Rutgers University

• A New Way of Detecting Preference Falsification: A Modus Tollens Method - Yingnan Joseph Zhou, University of Texas at El Paso; Xuchuan Lei

Chair

• Wenfang Tang Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Discussant

• Jennifer Pan Stanford University